As a part of its tradition, the Kadar tribal group of India's Western Ghats region hunted hornbill birds. Once this practice was declared illegal, the government employed members of the Kadar tribe to perform work outside of the forest .
A CEPF-supported project, however, brings some of the tribe members back to their traditional environment, using their skills and knowledge to help protect the birds they used to hunt.
Amitha Bachan received a CEPF small grant for a project that seeks to empower the Kadar tribe to conduct community-based conservation and monitoring of great hornbills (Buceros bicornis) and Malabar pied hornbills (Anthracoceros coronatus).
Amitha trained as a botanist and began his career studying riparian flora. He became interested in hornbills having studied their important ecological role in dispersing the seeds of forest canopy trees, and has devoted the last seven years to research on the birds and their conservation.
The project focuses on the Vazhachal Forest Division in Kerala State, one of CEPF’s priority sites and also the focus of a separate CEPF large grant to WWF India that is working to designate 10,000 hectares of this site as a Community Forest Resource Use Area, a form of community-managed protected area. Vazhachal supports the last remaining example of intact riparian forest in Kerala and is the last nesting locality for Malabar pied hornbill in the state. It also supports a sizeable population of great hornbill.
Both species are cavity nesters, with the female nesting inside a hollow tree and being fed by her partner throughout the nesting season. The species are threatened by loss of suitable nesting trees, as well as by hunting. The predictable movements of the birds, between their nesting trees and fruiting figs, coupled with their large size, makes them attractive targets for hunters.
Vazhachal is also home to the Kadar tribal group, who still depend on forest and aquatic resources for their livelihoods. Of the 1,400 Kadars in the world, around 850 live in the Vazhachal Forest Division, together with around 150 people from the Malayan tribal group. Following the construction of hydroelectric dams in the mid-20th century, the forest-dwelling Kadars were settled into colonies. Many are now engaged on a daily wage basis by the Forest Department to carry out habitat improvement and tourism management work inside the forest.
Traditionally, the Kadars used to hunt hornbills on an opportunistic basis to supplement their families’ diets. Although Vazhachal is not a protected area, hunting is officially outlawed under the Wildlife Protection Act.
In 2004, Amitha began to survey the hornbill population of the forest division, finding a total of 62 active nests by 2007. In order to benefit from their traditional knowledge of the forest and its ecology, Amitha engaged Kadar men as research assistants. Over several years, Amitha trained a core of around 15 former hunters as hornbill monitoring guards. In 2006, Amitha approached the Forest Department for support, and they began to provide three months’ wages per year for each man to monitor the hornbill nests during the nesting period.
The CEPF small grant is enabling Amitha and his tribal assistants to consolidate the hornbill nest monitoring program at Vazhachal and expand it into three neighboring forest landscapes: Parambikulam, Chalakudy, and Nelliampathi. To start the CEPF project, Amitha conducted an awareness program in each Kadar settlement in these forest areas. This generated a large amount of interest in the project, and many people asked to become hornbill monitoring guards. Amitha selected 31 guards, conducted field training and set them to work monitoring nesting trees, thereby tripling the scale of the project in terms of area covered and people engaged.
The Ministry of Environment and Forests recognized the scale and significance of the project and, in 2010, provided funding for the hornbill monitoring guards for the first time. This is a major achievement, because it ensures sustainability of the initiative at scale. Amitha is now planning to help the hornbill monitoring guards to form a community-based organization so they can raise and manage their own funding.
Both the Kadar community and the Forest Department have taken great pride and ownership of the project, and view it as prestigious. For example, a local producers’ cooperative has adopted the hornbill as its logo.
The hornbill monitoring guards are enthusiastic about their achievements. The project has allowed them to do what they love: spend time in the forest observing wildlife. Some of the guards reported that the project supports their traditional skills and customs, and that they prefer it to all other work. And although the Forest Department only provides salaries for three months of the year, the local people also collect data opportunistically for the remaining nine months without pay, Amitha said, because of their enthusiasm.
The proof of the initiative’s success can be found in the fact that, over the last five years, there have only been two recorded cases of hunting or nest predation of hornbills. After talking to the people responsible, Amitha believes that they too have ceased these activities. Numbers of Malabar pied hornbill, the rarer of the two species, increased from one active nest in 2005 to five active nests in 2010, and the species is believed to be moving into neighboring areas. Around 80 nests of great hornbill have been identified and are being actively monitored.